Symantec launches Zero Impact 2009 product lines

by Steve Ragan - Sep 9 2008, 11:03

This morning, Symantec officially launched the 2009 lineup for its corporate and residential security offering Norton. The company is shifting gears and moving towards a “Zero Impact” product that comes in lighter and faster than the previous versions of the Norton family.

Norton AntiVirus and Norton Internet Security 2009 will each feature the “Zero Impact” enhancements as well as over 300 other improvements to the software. The new products are almost totally redesigned and, after using the beta products for a while in The Tech Herald lab, it is clear they are geared to sit resident on the system without notice. Lower memory footprints, and a huge drop in system resource usage compared to Norton 360 or the 2008 product suites, are just two of the new features.

Also new to the 2009 lineup is the community-driven “whitelist” that will remove the need to scan common operating system and known “clean” files. The lower total number of files that need to be scanned with each run means scans on larger systems will be cut to a fraction of the time seen in past versions. In the lab, while testing the 2009 betas, the scanning fell by almost 10 minutes compared to results from Norton 360.

"Pulse" is the name given to the system-update manager, delivering new signatures and definitions every five to 15 minutes. While it's slower than the newer “cloud” coverage offered by McAfee, this is the same update service users of Norton have grown accustomed to, and the faster updates mean better and faster coverage compared to other Norton products.

Since Symantec makes a huge deal in its marketing about “Zero Impact” and the improvements in the 2009 software, PassMark Software gave them a benchmark test.

The test results revealed that the 2009 offerings from Symantec are booting, scanning, and launching faster than previous versions. The testing details returned that Symantec’s 2009 line booted in just under 34 seconds, scanned in just under 33 seconds (Kaspersky and Panda scanned slightly slower and finished in second and third respectively), and will launch the GUI in 253.68ms, second only to ESET in GUI testing.

Norton used to be known as a system killer, it would murder RAM when running on some systems. The benchmark testing shows a RAM footprint of fewer than 7MB for Norton Internet Security 2009, while Norton Internet Security 2008 and Kaspersky finished second and third.

While Norton didn’t do so well with other benchmarks, such as File Copy, Move and Delete, Installation of third-party applications, or Registry Key size, the installation was faster (under 60 seconds) and the total disk size was smaller.

Norton Internet Security 2009 and Norton AntiVirus 2009 are available now. Norton Internet Security 2009 is $69.99 USD for a three PC license, which includes a one-year subscription to updates, and Norton AntiVirus 2009 is $39.99 USD -- it too comes with a one-year service subscription.

More information and full details of features can be found here. The Tech Herald will have a full review of Norton Internet Security 2009 soon.

 

The Tech Herald: Norton Internet Security 2009

The Tech Herald: Norton offers testing on 2009 products via public beta

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